Many websites on the internet allow users to register user accounts. Some websites may have hundreds of millions of registered users.
Presently, some seller users on certain shopping websites, in order to promote their own merchandise on the websites, register several useless accounts either manually or using automated techniques. These falsely registered accounts on a website are often used to commit fraud or other activities that are detrimental to the normal operation of the website, and thus are also referred to as maliciously registered accounts. For example, if maliciously registered accounts are used to purchase a certain product, false sales records are generated, which may artificially drive up the sales of the product and deceive consumers into thinking that the product is more desirable than it actually is.
Conventionally, malicious registrations can be curbed using either pre-registration prevention or post-registration processing. Pre-registration prevention is generally accomplished by adding a verification code input step during the website user registration process. To a certain extent, this technique is able to prevent automated programs from registering false accounts. Post-registration processing targets maliciously registered accounts which have already been generated when pre-registration prevention has been ineffective. For example, post-registration processing may target a particular type of user identifier, such as cookies. If the number of account number logins associated with the same cookie exceeded a predetermined value, then it may be determined that these account numbers associated with the same cookie are maliciously registered account numbers.
However, the conventional techniques described above are associated with some drawbacks. While adding a verification code during the website user registration process may prevent account registration by automated programs, it does not prevent malicious registrations that are generated by large numbers of manual registrations. Determining that multiple account numbers are malicious because they are linked to the same user identifier is only able to discover a minority of maliciously registered accounts because the majority of maliciously registered accounts will not necessarily share a common user identifier. In the cookie example, if the same website user uses an account number at different times on different devices, the associated cookies are very likely to be different and so checking the number of account numbers associated with one cookie is not an effective way to discover abnormal information.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a mechanism for the recognition of characteristic groups, where a characteristic group is suspected to be associated with one or more potentially maliciously registered accounts. By identifying characteristic groups, buyer users may be prevented from being deceived and the transaction security of online shopping may be increased.